1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method for amorphizing materials, the method using injection of exotic atoms into a solid with electron beams (injection of atoms induced with electron beams) in the field of materials engineering.
2. Background of the Art
In the field of materials engineering, properties of amorphous materials have been noted and materials having new functions developed by using the properties. As methods for producing amorphous materials, (I) the melt quenching method, (II) the vacuum deposition method and sputtering method, (III) the particle beam (including electron beam) irradiation method, etc. are established.
The melt quenching method of (I) has inevitably the following disadvantages.
(1) A greater quenching rate than a certain value is required all over the material in order to obtain a homogeneous amorphous material, so that the form is limited to a thin ribbon or line form having thickness of several tens .mu.m at most. (2) As the realizable quenching rate is limited, depending on the elements and the composition of alloys, some specific materials are not amorphizable. Further, an obtained material might be an aggregate of microcrystals or a mixture of amorphous materials and microcrystals. (3) For producing composite materials of amorphous and crystalline material, another technique for fusing the two is required, and the realizable combination is also limited.
The amorphous materials produced by the vacuum deposition method or the sputtering method of (II) are more homogeneous than the obtained materials by the method of (I). However, these methods have the following disadvantages.
(1) The film thickness is at most several .mu.m. (2) The composite material is produced by controlling the temperature of a substrate on which a thin film is deposited. However, the thickness over the whole film of the obtained material is at most several tens .mu.m. (3) As atoms are aggregated on the substrate after the atoms are vaporized, the difference of vapor pressure and sputtering rate of atoms constituting alloys causes the difficulty of controlling a composition of amorphous alloys.
The method for irradiating particle beams containing electron beams of (III) (Japanese Patent Application No. 58-125,549) is a useful method and can dissolve many disadvantages existing in the methods of (I) and (II). However, the successful conventional examples are limited to intermetallic compounds having definite components. Therefore, the method is silent about application to the field of electron materials and properties change remarkably with a little change of the components of alloys.